JD Amer

RSS used to be a hard sell, now most people seem to buy into the idea. Even though readers / aggregating homepages were around and people used them, no one seemed to think that the connection was being made between RSS and custom homepages. That fear seems to be gone, and RSS has won popular appeal… though it seems to have lost all buzz (no one really cared when google didn’t include a browser rss icon in Chrome). Now the hard sell seems to be semantic. People just don’t get that into structured data – and really it does sound pretty boring. Web2.0 was easier to sell, because it involved social networking and mass crowds. Semantic web is a harder sell because it involves primarily data organization. Eventually it should enhance interactions – but just telling someone that they need to have their data organized because at some point there may be tools that take advantage of the structure of data to enhance users ability to interact with your data, potentially in a way that takes advantage of the social graph… well, that’s nice, but who really cares? And why should people invest in something so early stage?

I love the theory of the semantic web, and microformats in particular – but semantic is not sexy… and it needs to be. Thoughts? How do you pitch the semantic web?

The iphone app store is the AOL (think AOL 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, etc) of the mobile web.

I hate the iPhone… no, really I hate the iPhone app platform. Why? Because it’s pushing the mobile web backwards and is a walled garden. It’s terrible.

The promise of the web, and the mobile web, as I see it, is the openness of building on a single platform accessible to all. You can - for the most part - access the same sites on Firefox as you can on Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, and Opera.

Imagine if I told you that you couldn’t read my blog unless you had a certain computer using a certain browser… and even then you potentially had to pay for it. It sounds archaic and idiotic, and it sounds like the iphone app store.

Building for closed platforms, and making programs that are not universally accessible, stifles innovation by limiting the number of participants. I can’t believe the amount of hype that the iPhone app store gets, when it’s terrible for the mobile web.

I’ve been against the premise of platforms since the Facebook platform started - that seems to have killed itself off, and I can only hope that the same happens to the iPhone app store. I’m hoping that more developers start to act like Google in the world of mobile, but even that strategy requires the right browser.

Mobile is still an odd animal, in that not all mobile phones can the same technologies and browsers do vary widely based on your phone. However, the problem of unequal capability does not go away by building for a closed platform… it goes away by building for open browsers that work on multiple platforms… like skyfire, or android’s browser (eventually, at least that’s what we’re told). You don’t have to look any further than Microsoft to see the problems that occur, and lack of innovation that happens, when everyone focuses on building for one closed platform.

I wrote recently about twitter and facebook as sort of minimalist social apps on the lopico blog. These two sites are a unique combination, because of the draw that they have ~ and not much else. But it is the draw of these two that I think could really give just about any company enough justification to drop their web presence anywhere else. Maybe LinkedIn too…

For most businesses, more people are on facebook, twitter, and linkedIn (FTL for the rest of this post) at this very moment than are likely to be on your site in the next year. Why not simply harness that power of that network and similar networks, and forget about trying to build up a site that will see low traffic?

Use Facebook as a storage for content, twitter as a thought provoking conversation tool, and LinkedIn to draw contacts and job applicants.

This is drastically different than what I said in the aforementioned Lopico post in which I said - build from scratch, don’t build off of existing networks. The difference is one of audience. If I am talking about building a web app - I think innovation is hurt by developing on top of platforms. However, if we are talking about traditional businesses looking to harness the power of the web (e.g. a bar, law firm, or even a band) then why not go where everyone else is, instead of asking them to come to you?

You don’t need a website, but you do need the web - and you need to know how to use it.

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I should at least partially credit this post to a quick conversation I had on twitter today with @kevinokeefe